


My Love Cuts to the Quick

by hexburn (thestormapproaches)



Category: League of Legends RPF
Genre: Angst, Blood, Exes, Hurt/Comfort, Knives, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Pain, Sad, Self-Harm, almost Hurt No Comfort, butterfly knife, evelynn-inspired, inspired by selfmade looking absolutely devastated after fnc vs mad spring 2021 week 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29101335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestormapproaches/pseuds/hexburn
Summary: Oskar can't take it, he really can't, everything is awful and he's horrified by himself in so many ways. He's an utter failure in game, his teammates are dissatisfied, everything is coming up jaws. And someone else needs his love more than he does.Is it really a surprise Oskar does what he must? And is it a surprise that Tim still thinks of him?(No, not at all.)
Relationships: Nick "LS" De Cesare/Tim "Nemesis" Lipovšek, Oskar "Selfmade" Boderek/Tim "Nemesis" Lipovšek
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	My Love Cuts to the Quick

**Author's Note:**

> TW: SELF-HARM, GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SELF-HARM.
> 
> inspired by how devastated selfmade looked, as well as a while ago when nem said he gave selfmade a knife as a gift. :^)
> 
> if you'd like references for what the knife is (not irl, just in this fic): [here is a link to a CS:GO replica butterfly/balisong butterfly knife at knify.gg](https://knify.gg/product/butterfly-blue-steel/). these knives irl are toy knives and are not sharp, in fact this company only sells dull butterfly knives.

Oskar doesn’t pull punches, and neither does the truth. It’s a loss, a hard loss, a loss that puts them below a 50% winrate, and even if Oskar is a cocky, carefree guy almost every day of his life, he knows he’s what lost the game. He doesn’t bother to look at Discord. He may not have a server any more, but Fnatic sure does, and as per usual they’ll be calling for his head.

Nothing new. It’s the same way they called for Tim’s, after all.

(Tim, Tim, Tim, cries every cell in Oskar’s body.)

With a sigh, Oskar sits up in bed, tired of scrolling aimlessly through YouTube and yet not tired enough to sleep. They had played the last match of the day and yet it still seems too early to rest. Besides, after a performance like that, he wants something to remind him of what being happy felt like, and today, he doesn’t want that to be-

His midlaner- no. His new midlaner knocking at his door.

(Because Tim is still his midlaner.)

When Nisqy tries to enter his room, Oskar pushes back. Maybe he would allow Yasin into his grief blended with rage on a different day, try to burn off the anger in his heart with something more fun than working out, but today Oskar is angry in a way that burns between his lungs and spreads its fire across his back. When Nisqy tries to force his way in, Oskar snaps.

If he had a baseball bat, he would have grabbed that first, but as it stands, he grabs his knife and waves it around just recklessly enough to make Yasin leave. And instead of putting away the beautifully-carved knife’s blade, Oskar leaves it out as he sits at his desk in his room.

(His room is too poorly-lit to illuminate the beautiful weapon, but it always was, wasn’t it.)

He has had it for three years, now, and it truly is his own, but to Oskar, the knife is still simply the gift. Tim’s gift to him is elegant, simple, sophisticated and powerful, just like Tim himself, and, again just like Tim, capable of hurting Oskar deeply while also being his protection. And still like Tim, Oskar cares for it, cleaning it meticulously and sharpening it when its blade grows dull with disuse and taking it out to play on nights when the days have been hard.

It weaves itself through Oskar’s grip just like Tim’s fingers. Colder, though.

(Tim’s hands were always cold; the metal comes so close to replicating it.)

Absent-mindedly, Oskar lets it keep twirling, dancing between his fingers until he slows their waltz to a stop and grips the knife as it should be brandished, then eases up his grip. He’s not fending off an attacker, after all, and such operations as the one he’s undertaking require steady hands and precision, nothing like a butcherer’s hold on the knife. Instead, Oskar wields it with a light touch, his thumb bracing the blade and the skin of his inner arm against its sharp side.

Like rosepetals, his flesh parts beneath the knife’s edge. Oskar sighs.

_(Drink the pain, toss away the rest.)_

His other vices flit through his head for but a moment - smoking, alcohol, vaping. But he doesn’t want to taste smoke right now, and being hungover will mean the next time he does this, there could be worse consequences than a new scar, and he’s not keen on perfuming his room with sour-apple candy. Before any blood can seep down far enough to reach the knife’s handle, Oskar allows it to retreat from its intrusion into his body, then realigns it and sinks in again.

The second one is never quite as good, and Oskar crossed a scar with this new mark, so his skin twists unhappily. But Oskar does it again anyway.

_(My love cuts to the quick.)_

This third one lands correctly, across a thin stretch of skin not marred with tiny knots of flesh or beaded scars. Oskar can’t help but smile at it at first, how it slides in without hardly any resistance thanks to its well-kept edge and how the redness eases itself up alongside the blue-steel blade with beautiful contrast. It nestles deeper into him, though Oskar is careful to mind where gravity guides it.

There’s the knowledge that if he went just a centimetre further, he could end his career. Maybe it would be nice to have an excuse.

(But for now it’s not worth trading his freedom for his hands, only his wrists.)

For as reckless and senseless and stupid as Oskar is, he’s not dumb enough to do that, so the knife slowly eases out of his flesh, leaving a thin seam of skin that rapidly knits itself together with blood. Oskar lets it pool while he wipes off his blade - the blue steel can’t be allowed to rust, lest Oskar have to clean it or risk disease. Then, with the same clinical carelessness, Oskar retrieves a pack of bandages and cleans up the mess he’s made of his arm, healing himself the same way Tim had, when Oskar first accidentally hurt himself with the gift all those years ago.

It’s less accidental, now. But that doesn’t change anything.

_(I remember when just a little pain did the trick.)_

He slides his sleeve back down over the bandage, covering it up well enough. No one checks his sleeves, anyway, and they’re baggy and concealing, just like his signature hat, though tonight he leaves the hat on its post in favour of simply pulling up his hood over his headphones. He’s just a lonely boy in a dark room with a computer and nothing to do, after all.

YouTube thumbnails graze his vision but he moves over to Twitch soon enough. And even then, though he tries to tell himself he doesn’t need to watch LCS, his fingers click onto LS’s stream despite himself.

(They know who he really wants to see, anyway.)

Oskar keeps silently watching as Tim laughs, jokes, teases, gets sulky with LS. Listening to him warms some frozen part of Oskar’s heart, not enough for it to melt but enough to almost unfreeze, with Tim’s heat and the knife slipping between his fingers feeling like Tim’s hand. Part of him knows that shouldn’t be LS, that should be Oskar himself, that should be-

But it doesn’t matter what Oskar thinks it should be. LS probably needs Tim, too.

(Oskar knows that he’s selfish, but it’s so hard to admit it.)

It’s almost absurd, how Tim draws a certain kind of people to him, people who are broken and disjointed and too sharp around the edges, people whose unfinished sides need gradual sanding lest they give an unsuspecting handler splinters. Even Oskar feels the pull from Berlin to Slovenia, and LS’s magnetism is strong enough to pull Tim from across the world. He hopes LS will enjoy that feeling, of being complete and smooth-hewn and polished, the same way that Oskar did for those three beautiful years.

As for Oskar, he’ll see what he can get, and he’ll take anything. Except Nisqy, for now.

(Been there, tried that, found it lacking.)

Oskar continues to watch, absorbing as much of Tim’s voice as he can. His eyelashes flutter, but he can’t let himself fall asleep, he needs this right now and he needs it desperately. The knife slips between his fingers again and again, and he watches, and the arm with his bandage messily-done lays to the side so as not to further aggravate his body.

He wishes he could be there right now. Or have Tim with him.

(And both would be possible, if Oskar hadn’t fucked it all up.)

When at last Team Liquid wins, earning the result Oskar had hoped his team would find and never did, the stream rapidly ends, and both Tim and Jus leave LS’s stream ostensibly to sleep. Oskar finds himself watching LS, too, as he waves goodnight to all his viewers and goes to bed at eight in the morning in Korea. Then, with a reluctant sigh, Oskar prepares himself for the ordeal of standing up and laying down in bed to sleep.

A Discord call lights up his screen and saves him from the sleepy shadows. As soon as Oskar sees who it is, he accepts.

(He’s been waiting too long for this.)

“Hi,” says Tim.

“Hey. Shouldn’t you be going to sleep?”

“I could say the same for you, it’s late.”

(He’s right.)

“I’m glad you answered. Thought you would be asleep already.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Oskar answers gruffly.

Tim chuckles with that sweet sleepy smile, the one Oskar could drink down for days and never be sated, the one Oskar could press his own lips against for just a split second and feel the same formation in his own expression. “It’s been a long day,” says Tim, everything and nothing all at once.

(Just what Tim means to Oskar.)

“Do you want to turn on cams? I can turn on mine, I kind of want to see you too - besides, talking to a Discord icon is kind of awkward.”

“...alright.”

Oskar knows he’s not the prettiest right now, what with the death in his eyes and the life oozing out of him. But Tim never minded before, right?

(Maybe he did and Oskar never noticed.)

“Hey,” says Tim once their cameras are on and Oskar can see Tim sitting there, so innocent in his clean, white-walled, red-decorated room. Oskar tries to ignore himself, also in the call, looking like an escaped convict in the darkness of a prison cell, face illuminated only by the light of Tim’s room on Oskar’s computer screen.

“Hey yourself.”

“I like seeing you,” Tim says again.

“I like seeing you too.”

(If only Oskar weren’t so stupid.)

“How was your day today?”

“You were watching, you know how it went,” and Oskar knows he’s being rude but there’s nothing else to say about his day. For all he’s concerned, the loss is the only thing that happened, and how horrifically he ran it down is the only thing that matters.

Sometimes his self-inflicted punishment is enough to distract him. Lately, increasingly, it’s not.

(But Tim is.)

“We’ve had worse,” Tim says lightly, “you know we have - a rough start is nothing, I know you’ll make it through easily, sometimes it just takes time. Adapting is hard, but it comes with time.”

“I know.”

“It would be easier if-” Oskar starts.

“Don’t,” says Tim firmly.

(How is Oskar supposed to do anything else?)

“If I hadn’t inted it,” Oskar continues, adjusting his course ever so slightly from team deprecation to self deprecation.

“No loss is one person’s fault,” Tim answers, reciting Oskar’s old advice to him after too many nights spent scrolling Reddit.

“How was your day?”

“It was good,” Tim says, reluctantly dropping the topic.

“Good.”

_(My love cuts to the quick.)_

“Oskar?” Tim asks, disrupting their late-night silence.

“Yes?”

“Are you doing it again?”

“Yes,” says Oskar truthfully, because there is no other answer to give.

“When did you start again?”

(When Tim decided to start over with someone else.)

Before Oskar can answer, Tim interrupts himself, murmuring, “oh- sorry, Nick is texting me, just give me a second...”

Oskar nods politely and watches as Tim replies quickly, then faces his webcam with the same angelic openness in his expression as he looks at Oskar as best as he can with the distance between them. He tries not to get jealous, to little success, but what can he really do?

There is a patient in the E.R, and it isn’t Oskar, and he cannot demand his nurse’s attention when there are others who need him more. Oskar simply wishes altruistically that LS will be fine.

(Because the sooner he’s fine, the sooner Oskar will get Tim back.)

“Oskar, you should come visit me in Korea in offseason. I miss you.”

“I don’t know if it would line up with the competition schedule, I need to quarantine both ways, no?”

“Well, maybe the rules will change by then,” Tim says hopefully.

“I hope so too.”

(He’s so desperate.)

Blearily, Oskar yawns against his will, even as he struggles to stay awake and fights his body and screams in his mind and begs himself to not give in, to not fall asleep and not give Tim any reason to let Oskar go, to keep Tim holding onto Oskar for as long as possible if not forever. The effort fails, and Oskar yawns, and Tim chuckles sweetly but Oskar hates the sound because he knows what’s coming.

“You need to go to sleep,” Tim says with a chiding chuckle like that of a boyfriend whose careless partner keeps building a collection of accidental injuries, and a little part of Oskar cries.

“Love you,” Tim says, just the way he used to.

“Love you too,” Oskar answers, knowing the sentiment behind the words has changed as the distance between them widened.

(When the call is over, shadows touch him again, and Oskar shivers.)

His bed doesn’t quite welcome him, and he lands on his arm wrong and nearly screams, and his pillows and blankets are too cold as always, but he has a heating pad to solve the last problem and sleepy patience to solve the first, and soon enough Oskar is in bed with what resembles comfort. His eyes are weary, his hands exhausted, his heart aching, his mind shot. His arm hurts.

Oskar adjusts the bandage slightly to make sure the wound didn’t reopen, and, finding no trouble, lets it be. Uncomfortable, but endurable.

He cradles his wounded arm the same way Tim used to cradle it, doing his best to replicate the comfort.

(It isn’t the same.)

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, i hope you enjoyed!  
> and let me know what you thought of the structure or if you noticed what it is! i had fun writing with these particular constraints


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